1. Field of Invention
The invention generally relates to musical instruments, specifically to an improvement to electronically amplified harps.
2. Prior Art
Previously, harps have been electrified by either of two means. Either the soundbox of an acoustic-designed harp would be fitted with an internal microphonic device, or each and every string was fitted with an individually wired microphonic device. Neither of these methods has been altogether satisfactory, since the soundbox approach is highly prone to accidental feedback and player noise pickup, and the individual string approach requires much hand labor and very careful electrical shielding, to avoid pickup of hum by the connecting wires. The individual string approach is also prone to electrical signal “drop-out” of any one of the string microphones due to the high parts count and limited reliability of the method. Both of these prior art methods also suffer from issues of uneven sensitivity. In the soundbox approach, the specific placement of the transducer within the soundbox tends to be oversensitive to some frequencies, and quite insensitive to others. Uneven sensitivity of the individual string approach stems from the manufacturing variation among the microphones, which tend to be hand-made due to the low sales volumes typical of such troublesome instruments, and with the specifics of each microphone's mounting position.
Because electronic amplification and effects are such desirable traits, a rather high percentage of harpers at one time or another will add an audio transducer or microphone to their instrument, if only as a poor compromise to enable them to play in larger venues and be heard at all. These retrofitted acoustic harps, taken in total with soundbox-amplified electric harps, undoubtedly constitute the bulk of electrified or electric harps today. As a result of the simplicity with which acoustic harps can be retrofitted or built with soundbox microphones, there are no preponderant manufacturers of such harps on the world scene.
Prior art manufacturers of soundbox-amplified electric harps currently rely upon well-established designs and methods for creating acoustic harps, to which they merely add in the soundbox microphone system. This results in a hybrid instrument that produces a large volume of acoustic sound (to listeners who are near the performer) as well as the electrical signal, which may be heard by listeners very far from the player. Obviously, if an electrical effect is being applied to the electrical signal (such as chorus, echo, etc), then the nearby listeners will hear a completely different audio performance than the distant listeners. This problem actually can make the player perform more poorly, since the player is not necessarily aware of how the electronically processed signal sounds, and they may not therefore be able to adapt their playing styles to best utilize the effect that has been added.
Soundbox-amplified electric harps also tend to be just as large as their fully-acoustic counterparts, since the acoustic sound of these harps is predominantly what the player hears. Therefore a full-sized soundbox is usually preferred, so that the acoustic sound will not lack bass and be heard as “tinny”. As a result of this situation, soundbox-amplified electric harps gain no benefit from the usual miniaturization and reliability that electronics has brought to so many other elements of the modern world.
Soundbox-amplified electric harps are prone to the same variation in tone, even from unit to unit of the same design, due to natural variations in the soundbox wood and unavoidable variation in details of the soundbox construction. As a result, a very high level of craftsmanship is needed to produce a good sound in such instruments.
Soundbox acoustic harps, and also soundbox-amplified electric harps, are unusual instruments in the vibrating-string family in that they rely on a single piece of wood (the soundboard, which is the front of the soundbox) to operate as a structural device against the enormous tension of the strings, and simultaneously as a sensitive acoustic membrane capable of nuanced sound production over the full audio spectrum. Acoustic harps, and also soundbox-amplified electric harps, therefore are prone to cracking or “checking” of the soundboard as it inevitably ages into buzzing uselessness or even complete rupture. Soundbox-based harps are generally not long-lived instruments.
Electric harps built with the individual-string approach are not very common. The leading manufacturers using this technology are Lyon & Healey, with their “Silhouette” harp, Carnac of France, with their “Baby Blue” harps, and some of the electric harps by Kortier. Beyond these three manufacturers, the technology is almost never seen, due to the complexity, low reliability, weight issues, and high cost attendant to the designs.
European and American harps are fully standardized with an offset string plan that produces a very intense twisting force that tends to make these harps curve over to the side that has the strings, with time. To retard this theoretically inevitable phenomenon, these harps and their electrified counterparts are constructed with fairly massive front pillars that have kept harps quite heavy and cumbersome. Even still, the eventual bending and/or breakage of the front pillars of harps is somewhat expected by their owners.
The Paraguayan harp is similar to the Celtic harp but it does make use of a centered-stress design, as does the present invention. As a result, these harps tend to be lighter than their Celtic counterparts. The Paraguayan design, like the Celtic, has tuning pins and/or geared tuning mechanisms located at the top of the strings and an acoustic soundbox located at the bottom of the strings. The soundbox in the Paraguayan harp is subject to the same difficulties and limitations as other soundbox harps, though, and therefore the Paraguayan design has not led to a practical electronic version that addresses the problems mentioned earlier herein.
The electronic harp instrument of Garritano (U.S. Pat. No. 6,787,688) is a complex electronic system involving local oscillators, frequency shifting, etc, which has not met with customer approval. The main concept of the Garritano patent is that the strings will always sound as if “in tune” because the vibrating strings are essentially used as on/off switches for the chromatic sound generation within the electronics of the instrument. This design attempts to provide a solid-body electronic harp-like instrument, but the sound produced by the device is quite divorced from the sound of the strings, due to the many levels of signal processing that is necessarily interposed between the vibrating string and the final output signal. Also, the Garritano invention relies on individual pickups and therefore is subject to many of the flaws and limitations accompanying that method, as detailed earlier herein.
Fishman (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,239,349 and 6,429,367) discloses a coaxial piezoelectric pickup wire for use with stringed instruments having a saddle or bridge, both of which are lacking in the general harp concept. Turner (U.S. Pat. No. 5,123,325) describes the use of piezoelectric sheet or film located in the saddle slot of the bridge. None of these prior art designs, nor the several others like them, constitute a useful method for practically integrating such pickups into the special geometry of the general harp plan.
Sharping lever inventions by Cunningham (U.S. Pat. No. 6,080,921), Truitt (U.S. Pat. No. 5,796,020), Bunker (U.S. Pat. No. 4,936,182), Fay (U.S. Pat. No. 5,140,883), and others, disclose methods of string sharping that are not efficiently compatible with the layout of the present invention.